"Heard of some grave sites out by the highway"

On Check Points, Troop Movements and the Dark Side of Mobility

“Heard of a van that is loaded with weapons
Packed up and ready to go
Heard of some grave sites out by the highway
A place where nobody knows.”

Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

The open road is a locus of freedom and one of state control. It’s where individuals, at least somewhat independent of who they are, get to participate in the same activity as countless others who may be quite different from them, encased in precious anonymity by the same recurring half-dozen car models in basic available colors. But you’re enjoying that freedom, mobility and anonymity on the state’s terms and on its turf. The open road wasn’t made for you.

In 1939 the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach began a long drive from Geneva all the way to Afghanistan. Together with the travel writer and journalist Ella Maillart, Schwarzenbach drove a brand new Ford across what had until quite recently been the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

Both women wrote books about the trip, both imbued with a sense of limitlessness, of possibility, of a world only slowly opening itself up to the automobile. Many of the roads they take are still in the process of being paved or even built. The infrastructure for their trip comes into being with their taking it. Maillart and Schwarzenbach (who is frequently mistaken for a man) are exploiting the vestiges of Empire to enjoy a degree of autonomy still rare for women in the late 1930s. But the two also — and precisely because they are taking a car — experience something new: borders.

“When I first travelled to the East five and a half years ago, sitting in the Orient Express,” Schwarzenbach writes, “the Balkans were a region of melancholy uniformity." But now, at harvest time, we’ve seen the borders." What richness, what dissimilarities, and then again what simple laws, recurring everywhere.” I love that juxtaposition, and even if Schwarzenbach means to describe something quite geographically specific with it, I’d like to think about it more generally here: roads, especially highways, combine “a melancholy uniformity” on the one hand and experiences of breaks and borders on the other. Another word for that “melancholy uniformity” is of course freedom — the fact that the road keeps going, the fact that the road liquefies time and space, that the world retreats from you and dissolves into a staccato of identical-looking towns and identical-sounding exits.

The border is where that freedom is turned into its opposite: where your means of independence become a means of state control. Where the ethereal ease of the open road becomes oppressively concrete. Think of the many fictions about border crossings in film and literature. You never want to cross a border by car. Whether our heroes smuggle objects or themselves, whether they’re outrunning a government perimeter or a drug cartel: you really want to make sure to walk the final few feet. Have someone drive you up to the border, sure. But whatever you do, don’t enter the checkpoint. Of course, that’s not usually an option: much as you might want to abandon the car, or leave the highway, might want to continue on foot or on bike, the road delivers you with fate-like insistence into the border crossing, the check point, the inspection.

A lot of the infrastructure Schwarzenbach and Maillart drove over was completed just in time to be used by the advancing armies of Nazi Germany. Schwarzenbach in her book describes how locals in much of the Balkans (especially members of the various German speaking minorities) ask whether “Hitler-man” and his armies are coming. The roads the women are taking don’t just connect these people to the outside world. They open them up to tanks and artillery to come.

There’s an essay (called “Auto Bahnen”) in which Friedrich Kittler tries to rethink “who thought up the automotive folly called autobahn.” His claim is that it wasn’t the Germans, but the French. To be sure, the first car-only civilian road is the AVUS (Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übungsstraße) in Berlin, opened in 1921 but first conceived in the final decade of the Second German Reich. But, Kittler points out, at Verdun in 1916, the French military turned a country road into a bi-directional highway with a central divider, turning “the old-fashioned Route Nationale 109 into the first autobahn.”

The first autobahn, Kittler suggests, thus had nothing to do with the sportsmen and recreational drivers of the AVUS; nor with the picture-perfect German families in their VW Beetles envisioned by Nazi propaganda. It was created in order to resupply badly cut off troops after the Germans had disrupted rail connection to Verdun. And rather than an open space, it was a place where — as Major Aimé Doumenc put it, “two endless chains” of vehicles slid past each other. “The way,” Kittler adds, “trains had been passing each other since 1930.”

I am not sure Kittler gets the facts exactly right — he also claims that right-hand traffic had been established in Germany by Napoleon Bonaparte to facilitate troop movement, which is cute but, as far as I know, apocryphal. But I think he’s right to point to the fact that militarism, the military and materiel were never far from highway design — or that, if they were far, it was in some way a temporary absence.

Motorways are among the places where states exert control over us most effectively. It’s a scene we know all too well from the movies: the terror of the road block, the checkpoint, the chokehold. The place where the flow of traffic is halted by people with guns, people who may represent the state or not, or one state or the other, or some version of the state or the other — but who represent potential violence in any case.

Of course, for millions of Americans the same can be said about perfectly flowing traffic: they drive along only to get picked out by cops, pulled over, and they get to feel exactly they you’d feel at an actual checkpoint, with all the possibility of violence that entails. For specific kinds of drivers — black and brown drivers, for one, drivers who seem to always match a description, or drivers who don’t look like they “should” be driving their kind of car — any stretch of highway is a potential checkpoint.

While debates about traffic and policing have largely focused on traffic stops, the checkpoint intensifies their logic and universalizes their reach. In the United States, such checkpoints are particularly common near the border. The Federal Government claims the right to conduct warrantless stops within a zone 100 miles from any US border. Customs and Border Protection maintains both permanent checkpoints — on major highways mostly near the Southern border — and so-called “tactical checkpoints” on secondary roads. The military language is hard to miss; well before Donald Trump and his party began casting the situation at the US border as an “invasion”, immigration checks presented themselves as aspects of life during wartime.

In recent reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you read a lot about strategically important towns being taken, and almost always that strategic importance is about what appear to be criss-crossing regional and territorial highways (the P-Network and the T-network, as best as I can tell). It doesn’t take much to turn the infrastructure of commutes, transport or joyride into one of bridgeheads and advances. This summer’s Alex Garland film Civil War was very good at hinting at this transformation of a recognizable civilian infrastructure into a tactical geography. And while I liked Garland’s movie, it was noticeable that when it came to the film’s travel scenes, Civil War really didn’t break any new ground visually.

We know these kinds of shots of cars abandoned on highways only too well. Whether it’s an alien invasion, a zombie apocalypse, a deadly virus outbreak: we get the same sets of iconic shots.

I think the thoroughness with which we have been habituated to these motifs speaks to our awareness of how deeply wrong it feels when traffic does not flow. But beyond that, I think these scenes point to the ease with which the transformation of our everyday civilian engineering into a tactical surface seems to be accomplished when there’s a war suggests that perhaps there’s more tactical geography to our streets than we tend to acknowledge.

Growing up in Germany, I was used to this system of signage: MLC, military load classification. It governed traffic for military vehicles of various sizes, and most importantly told tanks which bridges might not bear their massive load. Until 2009, it seems, these road signs were required by law — though they were never expanded into the formerly communist east. Until 1989, they were bright yellow metal reminders that the little Bundesstraße you were currently driving on also belonged to the US military, and might one day be a battlefield. And after 1989, they became reminders that these roads had not just been constructed for you to drive on — but as possible battlefields in an apocalyptic war that never arrived.

This isn’t necessarily limited to automobility, of course. Walk down the broad Avénue de l’Opéra towards the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris, and you get a sense of a traffic design intended to impress on the ordinary pedestrian the ease with which the state could get boots (and indeed artillery) on the ground, should it need to. " The railway stations are today the principal entryways into Paris,” the Baron Haussmann wrote. “To put them in communication with the city center by means of large arteries is a necessity of the first order.” A necessity not of transportation or convenience, a necessity of force projection. It’s a design “unfavorable to the habitual tactic of local insurrection” as Marcel Poëte wrote, an “opening up” of an “area of continual disturbance”, as Baron Haussmann wrote about Châtelet. And so the grand perspectives are a threat cast in steel, concrete and asphalt. You can see, you can enjoy the vista. But the vista stares right back, its emptiness loaded with the potential for howitzers and grapeshot. (All of the quotes in this paragraph are taken from Benjamin’s Arcades Project, specifically Convolute D, in case you’d like to read more).

But of course, the open road is also where state power can spectacularly hit its limit. It is the place where your tanks have to stop for pedestrians. Where soldiers end up fraternizing with the civilians they’re supposed to control. Where a Russian president might get on a tank and give a speech and your coup falls apart.

When Russia launched the full-scale invasion Ukraine in February and March of 2022, the Russian military clearly sought to establish a sense of inevitability (and hasten an anticipated collapse of the Ukrainian government) by seizing the central nodes of transportation. But while battles raged in various small towns and in far-flung forests, what most clearly sent the signal that the Russian Federation was falling way short of its ambitions were their very visible, even spectacular failures on the nation’s roadways. We all saw the burnt out shells of vehicles by the side of the road. We all saw the footage of Ukrainian tractors towing a broken down Russian tanks, somewhere between a AAA truck and a highway bandit. Most of all we watched as an immense column of assault vehicles went from an terrifying specter to an absolute farce — by doing the most natural thing one can do on a roadway: getting stuck in traffic.

So the militarization of the open road has a double edge: it can turn the most quotidian demonic, or reveal the hidden demonic side in our quotidian traffic infrastructure, the fact that it is designed to compatible with mass violence and mass death. But on the other hand, it exposes even the most vicious war machine to the crazy-making vicissitudes of our traffic infrastructures: the bridges that won’t carry your vehicles, for instance. Or the simple fact that whatever roadway we construct, we fill it with more metal than it can bear.